Hot & Sticky

The next time you go to a Chinese restaurant, you might want to save room for dessert.

For years, oranges and fortune cookies did the trick. But there’s a hot new Chinese dessert in town—well, in Flushing, at least—that’s as much fun to eat as it is delicious. “Ba si,” which translates roughly to “pulling thread” in Mandarin, has arrived with the influx of restaurants from the northern Chinese region of Dongbei. The versions at Golden Palace, M&T, and Fu Run are made from starchy produce like sweet potato, taro, and yam (sometimes apple too) that’s cubed, deep-fried to a crisp, and thoroughly coated with caramelized sugar. The resulting confection is conveyed in a molten heap to your table, where you’re meant to waste no time extracting a nugget with your chopsticks, dunking it in an accompanying bowl of cool water to solidify the caramel, and gobbling it down before the heap hardens into shellac. The extraction process results in foot-long strands of sugar that stretch like mozzarella on a slice of pizza. The sugar-thread effect is quite pretty, and the flavor about as sweet as you’d expect, with a nice underlying nuttiness from the tuber. Not as refreshing as a wedge of orange, perhaps, but a fine finale to a Flushing feast.